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Professionalism is Environmental…

February 4, 2010 11:42 am

Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and to specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The expert is the man who stays put.

~Marshall McLuhan, the medium is the MASSAGE

The Medium is the Massage
Author: Quentin Fiore

Categories: Amateurism, Professionalism, Books
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Virtue of the dilettantes…

June 29, 2009 7:18 pm

There are those who regard specialization as one of the great empowering virtues of our culture. After all, many of our most splendid achievements are the fruit of the hard-won specialized knowledge of highly focused experts, not of interdisciplinary dilettantes. But while great accomplishment can certainly be credited to the best sort of narrow-mindedness, it must also be acknowledged that many of our culture’s worst intellectual, practical, and spiritual failures are likewise consequences (and not all of them unintended) of attending to the details of life (especially the physical details) while neglecting the Big Picture–indeed, in many cases while denying the possibility of there even being a Big Picture.

I am convinced that the Church and her neighbors are in dire need of well-educated generalists–men and women whose intellects and lives offer an alternative to the destructive tendencies of our age’s habit of hyperspecialization.

~Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio June Letter

I think this is a pretty accurate call to holistic thinking in a modern atmosphere of atomized thought lives. At first glance I couldn’t help but to balk at this apparent about face from the last few interviews of the MHA journal focusing on focus and the need for attentiveness. But the more I think about it, the more I see the higher calling that is presented here.

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Categories: Professionalism, Mars Hill Audio
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